My husband (M30) and I (F28) have been married for about three years now. He’s a wonderful partner who quite frankly I don’t deserve. Sex has been kinda mehhh here recently mostly because I can’t bring myself to do it. The more I’ve reflected on this, I’ve figured out that I more often than not feel shameful afterward. I think this mostly comes from being brought up where no sec before marriage was shoved down my throat and if I were to ever do it, I would be dirty or unworthy. Like, I can’t even bring myself to climax with my husband because it seems like this is so ingrained in my head. Do any other women struggle with this? I had multiple sexual partners before my husband so I thought I was over it. I guess not.
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Therapy might help if you feel it is needed.
Outside of that, are you stimulating your clitoris and using sexual lubricants during sex?
I recommend a we-vibe touch x or a we-vibe tango x or a well lubricated finger either his finger or yours for stimulating your clitoris. Vaginal penetration by itself does nothing for me and feels a lot like someone gently touching the inside of the palm of my hand. It’s about as amazing as watching paint dry but if I am getting clit stimulation or anal stimulation it’s more enjoyable.
Talking through it with a therapist couldn’t hurt. It’s amazing how much internalized messaging during childhood can mess you up as an adult.
The older I get the more destructive I believe the evangelical approach to sex is. Not till you get married. But even then, not that way. No, that’s dirty.
It’s horribly unhealthy and impacts men and women for the entirety of their lives. Good luck putting it behind you. I hope you can.
Yes it’s why so many people who were saddled with those beliefs end up in therapy.
Sex drive is the strongest drive we have , once you attach guilt to that it’s a recipe for being unhappy.
And imagine if I told you the best perpetration for a subject was no preparation 🤷🏼♂️.
What if the two people are not sexually compatible for a myriad of reasons.
What if they don’t know what they like sexually yet , so they just roll the dice and hope for the best.
Does that sound like a plan of any kind ? It’s not
Always remember, no shame in having sex!
Therapy could be huge. That’s my #1 Rec. Really going through your thought processes and seeing how illogical some of them are helps. Also exploring your body through masturbation could be very helpful in understanding and accepting what works for you sexually.
Lastly, and coming from a religious background this may be a big no no for you, is drugs. Weed is good, and could be very helpful for playing with yourself especially. I have had incredible mind opening experiences with mushrooms and masturbation as well, which fundamentally changed how I look at sex. Lastly MDMA is probably the most useful couples/love/sex drug ever and can be incredibly therapeutic. Of course this is all up to you and your comfort level, but they can be gsme changing in this area.
Also would recommend reading about human evolution and sexuality. It could help get rid of a lot of the Shame around sea as it is totally natural.
Good luck 🙂 sex should be fun and enjoyable! And it’s totally natural. The negative programming around it is wrong and sad.
You might find these subreddits helpful: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Purityculture/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Purityculture/) and the sex positive Christian page [https://www.reddit.com/r/ChristianSexuality/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChristianSexuality/) There are discussions there regarding what you’ve experienced.
My wife and I were both raised hearing “no sex until marriage”, and honestly the sex we have is awesome.
It’s always been the dumbest mantra, belief, what have you, ever created in the history of the world.
Yes the whole purity mindset is damaging to everyone.
Religion pushed hard for no sex before marriage, but if you know anything about human relationships sex is SO IMPORTANT!! Part of why they preached it so hard back in the day is due to STD’s. We didn’t have a solution for syphilis until WW2, it was as destructive as dementia & your nose would fucking fall off. Bible age people said sex before marriage was a sin (for monogamy & therefore less std transmission) as well as no shellfish (huge population are allergic) as a means of self preservation. Life expectancy was young as fuck. Including pregnancy complications that’d fucking kill you. Bible had to do what it had to do to keep people alive & well during a terrible time in history. Not at all applicable to today.
I hope you know it’s super normal to go through challenges with intimacy after coming out of a Purity Culture environment!!!
A few resources to look into (in addition to therapy as others have mentioned):
Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free (book by Linda Kay Klein)
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life (book by Emily Nagoski)
I also HIGHLY recommend the following podcast episode which gets at why women who emerge from religious environments experience more pain and dissatisfaction with sex and how they can move through it:
[Episode of You Have Permission podcast](https://m.soundcloud.com/youhavepermission/a-massive-evangelical-sex-survey-120#t=0:00)
A healthy, beautiful, insanely good sex life is possible on the other side of this, OP! I’m sorry that your environments have put you in this place, but you won’t be there forever. Our brains can reprogram new ways of thinking with practice!
Ralizing you had other sex before being married… If you take the idea of no sex before marriage seriously, then take the idea of having as much sex as you want when you’re married seriously, too. Before you “didn’t have permission” now you have tons of it. Stop applying the rule now that’s it’s not applicable.
There are a lot of exvangelical & fundamentalist deconstruction subs that can probably give you some good advice too.
I struggled with this for many years. I would even feel massive guilt for masterbating. I eventually brought it up in therapy and was able to work past it. Although I will admit that the thoughts sneak in occasionally, it’s much less than before therapy. I definitely recommend finding a non-religious, sex positive therapist to work it out with.
I have been in this approach not voluntarily. My long term gf, now my wife, didn’t want to do it before the marriage but we used to have the naked make out and grinding n all. Now it seems like she is just not into having sex at all or even initiating anything. She hates blow jobs and even experimenting with something adventurous. We haven’t done anything in the last two months and just celebrated our 1st anniversary. Not sure how to tackle it but I do think a part of the reason is not being willing to do it even before we got married
Therapy.
You both underwent some quality brainwashing in your past and it wont be easy to fix if. Just live without sex as your religion recomends it.
How supportive is your husband?
My girlfriend (50s) had a ton of Catholic guilt and had never had sex in the light before meeting me.
Some body image reinforcement and now she runs around topless or naked and having pleasurable sex for the purpose of pleasurable sex finally clicked for her. She had always been secretly wanting to try a nudist resort and going to one really broke down a lot of her internal barriers. It has saved her thousands in therapy for sex and body image.
That said, growing up during the AIDS crisis screwed me up. Getting the message that having sex with someone was having sex with everyone they’ve ever had sex with in the last 10 years and recursing that to infinity and if you catch AIDS you are going to die a shunned death really sucked.
But yeah, you own your body. Sex is often messy but it isn’t dirty. You are a grown adult and own your body and he’s an adult and loves you and is your husband.
Assuming the two of you live alone, start wearing less around each other. If you spend evenings together and you are just wearing a bra on top or no bra and a loose shirt or topless or just panties and a t-shirt, it’s more comfortable to you and you’ll look hot for your husband. Then if you can get to 24 hours naked together, you’ll be comfortable naked together and then you can work on getting comfortable with having sex.
x
You are married now, so you are allowed to have sex. Try to do the 30 day sex challenge. Have sex 30 days in a row. You are married now, you owe it to yourself
Therapy. Self-love. Open communication with your partner and yourself. Ungodly amounts of LSD and staring into the fragments of your soul where sex is an integral part of who you are and the force behind all life on Earth. There are ways.
Did you feel this way with your previous partners or just your husband
Yes, I’ve been there. Being raised in a strict religious environment screwed me up. I still have a hard time just wanting to explore different things with my husband. I really struggle to break free from the mindset that was drilled into me as a teen.
I had a strict religious and cultural upbringing where fornication can literally, Quite literally, get you killed.
I got married when I was 26, never had a sexual partner before, didn’t really know my body and what I want, zero experience. I was tight as fuck.
Fast forward to 5 years post marriage. My sex drive is the highest I’ve seen in my entourage. I can’t get my hands off of my husband. I make love like a dirty slut and I find so much pride in doing so. I’ve learned quite a lot I can be a sex therapist by now lol.
My point is:your feelings have nothing to do with your upbringing but rather how you were made to feel when you actually had sex with the previous partners and now with your husband.
Mine would cherish me, encourage my efforts and he ended up by admitting that sex with me is the best he’s ever had and that just boosts my confidence and my desire to have more sex.
I would recommend that you start exploring your sexuality, experiment with what you like and what you don’t and leave this idea of shame behind. Your body is a gift and it deserves to get all the caring and the pleasure it can get. So come on girl, celebrate, Cherish and love your body ans don’t wait for anyone to do it for you. Once you get into this mindset you’ll become unstoppable.
I wish you the best of luck.
therapy (lots) helped me 😅
I’m 36 and we’re almost 10 years married and it’s taken me til just a couple years ago to feel confident and open and figure out what I like and how to tell my partner.
Also check omgyes (dot com I think)
To learn more about your body in a non-shameful educational way
Yeah purity culture has this effect on many people. Just know you’re not alone and I would suggest you seek therapy (but not with a pastor, with a real therapist).
It seems to me that there’s a lot of hypocrisy in that culture too. “No sex before marriage” often means “no sex with someone that isn’t me” when it comes to the men leading that charge. They want they’re women and girls to stay “pure” but they will gladly find an exception for that rule if they got the opportunity to get down. And then after the fact they’d say she was a temptress!
I’m so sorry. Yes. I’m currently single, but have a whole buttload of issues relating back to this exact teaching. It’s likely why I also have severe problems engaging in dating at all, and find it difficult to deal with someone finding ME attractive, as well as general self esteem. I’m currently in therapy for it, amongst other issues, but yeah, it sucks. The worst is knowing that my parents were/are loving people who didn’t mean to cause damage, so much as protect me. But unfortunately, that ain’t how this worked.
It messed me up the day after I was molested as I heard “gay people go to hell and you cannot have sex before marriage or you will have the same fate.”
All in the same sermon, so losing my virginity by being raped by a couple of guys really f’d with me as I grew up in church.
Not only is it a recipe for creating shame and sexual self loathing… It creates terrible marriages where people who have no chemistry find themselves married and facing years of either unsatisfactory sex or no sex at all. It is quite sad.
39m here, I got married at 27, and waited until marriage before having sex because of religion, and it Fuuuuucked me up. It caused huge amounts of stress and tension and hurt for both of us. Marriage is now over, that was definitely part of the problem. About a year ago I started going to therapy dealing with the fallout and finally had an aha moment of just how much shame I had internalized about sex.
So I ripped off the band-aid. I went on Amazon and bought basically every sex toy for men they had (over $500), eventually dove into the swinger community, responding to every double-list posting in my area that applied to me, got on AFF, cammed on and off, and had a whole bunch of sex with a whole bunch of singles and couples, had sex in an adult theater, going to a swinger party weekend, etc. I’ve calmed down a lot, nowadays I have checked off most of my bucket items, I have a FWB, and have (mostly) come to understand my sexuality and I’m definitely no longer ashamed of sex anymore. Obviously this isn’t an approach that would work for everyone (or even most people), but it worked for me.
But I cannot overstate just how damaging mainstream religion was for me growing up, especially when it came to sex. I would 💯 recommend therapy here.
This might sound silly and a bit off-topic, but do you know what your Enneagram is? I ask only because certain Enneagram types seem more prone than others to internalize those childhood narratives, and I have friends similar to you who have been able to process their childhood experiences (in part) by understanding and exploring their Enneagram. It’s certainly not the only thing I would recommend doing, but it may help you understand how you’re wired and why this particular narrative is stuck in your head.
Understanding my own Enneagram has helped me understand my relationships better.
If you want to know more, this is a good place to start: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions/
Best of luck to you!
Play through the shame. AS LONG AS ITS WHAT YOU WANT — try having him tie you up and gag you then make you climax so you can’t stop yourself from orgasming due to your conditioning. If you have a mental block that you want to break down, you would just be [consensually] surrendering your ability to have that religious conditioning prevent you from reaching your goal.
And religious sexual instruction is being preached by the most sexually dysfunctional cabals of elderly virgins and perverts no less.
It’s the most natural impulse and marriage itself is a fatuous tradition so go and fuck without any qualms
I’m 42 and I’m still suffering from being raised strongly Catholic. I feel ashamed of wanting sex. Especially as much sex as I want. I feel ashamed of my urges that are anything beyond vanilla. This pervades any logic that I have that it’s normal. This is just what I feel now. Going back in time, I believed woman didn’t like sex, that I had to make a women love me to even have sex, and that every time I had premarital sex or jerked off, I was inching ever closer to eternal fire. I had terrible anxiety about hell as a child. Nightmares all the time. Even after I left the church and went full on atheist, I was riddled with anxiety about dying. Even though logically, I didn’t believe anymore in hell. It wasn’t until I started to soften on atheism, and found my way to a personal spiritual belief about the universe and life/death that I was able to put the anxiety behind me.
You can deal with it somewhat, but you might need to seek therapy to help you bridge the gap.
Religious people are the only ones who’d tell you to make a lifelong commitment to someone you don’t really know intimately (no sex before marriage) or as a person (no living together even). Then when something goes wrong they’ll ask you to pray to God to solve all sorts of issues stemming from two people just basically being incompatible.
Not to mention if you are compatible and happy (like OP), too bad you’re stuck with these messed up teachings ingrained in you that you’ll struggle to get rid off just so you could live with less guilt.
Have you considered sex therapy to help you with those feelings? Purity culture has caused countless issues for many many people and it can be worked through. You deserve a happy and healthy sex life. Sex can be so wonderful and a way to connect with yourself and your partner if you can move past this. Really really recommend therapy